Joyfully Bohemian

What does it mean to be a modern day bohemian? Well...in essence it means whatever you decide it means. That's pretty much the point of it. Why do I identify myself as one? Art, travel, nature. Freedom of thought and generosity to name a few of the common aspects that resonate deeply with me. 

Tune in to this episode and I'll be talking more about this. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Have you ever read something and just stopped in your tracks and thought, hmm, I'm so grateful that that writer was able to put words to feelings that I myself had no words for until I read that. Welcome to the Joy Felicity Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Wakefield. I want to tell you the story of a girl who loved to dance and sing and play outside, and was free of heart, free of spirit, until the chains began to be wound around her. The chains of abuse, relationship chains, religious chains, guilt chains, insecurity chains, societal expectation chains, even education chains, all kinds of chains that told her that the way that she thought and the way that she felt and the thing that she wanted to be, the person she felt she was, was somehow wrong. And there was a better way to be and a different way to be, more acceptable way to be. Until finally she was chained so fast that she was kept in a cage almost, up inside of her own body, and became so remote to her own self in many ways that sometimes she almost forgot that she existed. Her host person went on with her life conforming to all of the outside expectations and all of the outside ways of thinking, and only every now and then allowed the little girl a chance to come out into the sunlight and breathe. But the feelings that came about were so frightening that almost immediately she was thrown back into her cage. Now you've probably guessed I'm I'm talking about me, and it sounds fairly dramatic what I'm saying, but do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like that? Like the person that you were as a child, your true innate self has just become bound so tightly by convention and by things that you've been taught, and things that you have come to believe are more correct than your own instincts and your own heart leadings that you literally almost go as far as chaining that person inside so that they cannot come out. Because you're so afraid of what will happen if you loosen those bonds and allow the world to see who you really truly are. You're so convinced that the ways that you actually think and feel are wrong, that you yourself choose to remain in denial as to what they even are, and to tell yourself that you are a certain kind of person, somehow knowing all along that you're not, that you actually don't agree with that, that you actually do dream for this thing that you think may not be okay to dream about, that you actually do have desires and wants and needs that are beyond the scope of what you have been told are okay. Good people don't act like that. Moms don't act like that. So I can't act like that. Religious people don't think like that. Smart people don't think like that. So I better not think like that. Except the problem is you do. No matter how tightly you try to chain that inner child, no matter how much you try to put down your true nature, it continues to bubble to the surface. And this war that we find ourselves in throughout our lives of fighting against our own selves, I believe is at the source of a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety. I'm not a therapist, I'm not going to claim to understand those things or diagnose them, but I know for myself that a lot of the source of my unhappiness in my life and of my anxiety and lack of fulfillment and even relationship problems that I have encountered in my life really come back in many ways to me fighting against me. And in recent years, I've been slowly starting to unpack a lot of that in my life. In this past decade, I have made a lot of major changes that needed to be made. I, in terms of some religious beliefs that I held and some relationships that were not healthy, that I was in, some ways of thinking I have challenged within myself and discovered that the outside world isn't always correct. And that sometimes it really is okay to let myself think what I actually think, to own it, to stand up for it, to defend it. At the very least, within my own heart and soul. As I've started to do this, what I have found is that that gains momentum. And the next thing you know, you can no longer, like you start to loosen the bonds on that inner child. You start to let it out in one area and then another and then another. And before you know it, you can't hold it in anymore. And you suddenly find yourself exploring things and challenging idea structures and changing things in your life that can be very disconcerting and unsettling for the people that know you or thought that they knew you as they discover new sides of you that had been kept quiet. It becomes disconcerting and unsettling for yourself as you have to realize how much of your life you spent shrouded, first of all, and even overwhelming in terms of realizing what is possible for you now. Maybe you haven't developed the skills to kind of deal with yourself as you really are. And so it you have to kind of baby step toward this a little bit, so to speak. But it's a very exciting process. At first, it can be very traumatic as you sort of shed old ways of thinking and are left sitting kind of in this vacant space. But then as you allow that inner child to come out to dance and play again, and as you start to allow yourself the privilege of thinking and feeling as you really do without guilt and shame, it's remarkable the transition that will come into your life. A lot of what started this massive level of change for me, I had already gone through a religious transition, but I think I was still hanging on to a lot of the guilt and the thought processes and things that were holding me back a little bit. But I signed up to take dance lessons, ballroom dance lessons, because I realized that I had chained myself so tightly that I actually was not even comfortable in my own body. I had so many insecurities that even though in high school I had been a dancer, now in my 50s, the I wasn't even comfortable in the way that my own body moved anymore. And I don't know if that resonates with any of you, but I found myself being kind of almost stiff and robotic in my movements and kind of hunched over. My posture had gotten just awful. I'd lost a lot of my flexibility, and I'm still working on a lot of those things. That's how bad it had gotten that even a couple of years later, I'm still working on it. But I signed up to take dance lessons to almost forcibly challenge myself to get used to being in my own skin again, get used to showing that artistic and creative side of myself that I had been too embarrassed to show for quite some time. And it turned out to be quite a transformative experience. I ended up dancing in a few competitions, very low level. I wasn't very good, but that wasn't the point. The point was to challenge myself to see if I could do something like that. And I did, and it was a lot of fun. I even danced in a women's composition of sorts, with several of us dancing this same Latin compilation, and we performed it at a local dance club. Never in a million years did I think that I would do something like that. And I was scared to death, and I don't know that it's something I would even want to do again. But the experience of doing that truly helped me to realize that there were parts of myself that had been unexplored for far too long. Parts of me and my nature that had been just simply kept down and forgotten. And it was time to stop that way of thinking. My dance teacher, Juan, he was almost a de facto life coach to me because as I had my lessons, we would have in-depth conversations about the world and politics and just different things about aging and all kinds of conversations we would have while we were dancing. Part of that he told me later was that if he could keep me talking, he could really see how many of the damn steps had gotten into my body. Because if he could stop me from thinking so much about the steps and I was still able to do them, then he knew that I really had it. So during these conversations, I really gained a lot of confidence in myself. But he stopped and he looked at me one day in the middle of a class and he said something to me that actually changed my life. He said, I look at you and I just have this sense that you're like a bird that's been in a gilded cage for a long time. And he said, I sense from you now that you're standing on the edge of the cage and you're ready now to fly, but you haven't quite gotten up the courage to test your wings. And I kind of laughed and we joked about it, but I don't think he realized how much impact that had on me to hear that, because in that moment I realized that he was right, that I had been doing a lot of work to open the door to my cage, but was still a little bit afraid to fully fly. I'm not dancing anymore. The studio closed, and I've moved to a new area where I haven't found a place to dance anymore. But I will take those lessons with me for the rest of my life. But especially those conversations with one and the impact that that particular statement had on me. Because going forward after that, a little bit at a time, a baby bird doesn't just all of a sudden fly freely. It takes some starts and stops. But since that day and that statement, I've been deliberately challenging myself to test my wings in different areas. I've been traveling. I have moved to the beach, which was a long-held dream that I had denied myself, and I'm not doing that anymore. I'm allowing myself to live life on my terms, the way that I want to live it now. And it's a discovery process, as you do learn to fly, to even figure out what that looks like for yourself. You think you know sometimes. This is what I want, this is what I believe, this is what I think, this is what I need. You think you know. But when you really start to strip away all of your previous thinking and get down to the roots, get down to the core and challenge all the things that you think you know, sometimes you discover that it's not at all what you saw. And that can be exciting, it can be scary, it can be all kinds of different feelings, but little by little over time, you come to a place where you become okay with that uncertainty. You become okay with the exploration process itself, and you realize that that is what life is about. It's what we're here to do, to discover who we really are, and to live authentically and true to that. So the thing that I read that was kind of an aha moment for me, I have found myself attracted to different ways of being as I've been more honest with myself about who I am. Different ways of dressing, it's even influencing my wardrobe and the things that I pick out to wear, the things that I have picked out to decorate my new home by the beach, they all are taking on kind of a similar pattern and a similar creative flair, I guess you could say. The lifestyle, the clothes, the furniture, all of it is different than anything that I've ever allowed myself before. But it all feels so very correct and so very authentic. So it's a slow process beginning to create this for myself, but I haven't had words for it. I've always joked around because of the way that I love to travel, that I'm a gypsy at heart. And I've made many, many jokes that I have come to the beach to grow my hair out gray and become a hippie in my old age. And I've joked around about these things, but this idea of this more bohemian life has still felt a little bit removed and remote to me personally until I read this statement describing what Bohemian means. And it was written by the American writer, I don't know if I'm gonna say this right, but Gillette or Gillette Burgess. And it was something, it was meant to be a definition of bohemian because there was this group of early American writers that had formed this club called the Bohemian Club, and they were exploring these ideas. And this is fairly lengthy, but I want to read it to you because it had such an impact on me. This was the definition of bohemian, according to this author. To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment, to laugh at fortune alike, whether she be generous or unkind, to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none, to fleet the time carelessly living for love and art. This is the temper and spirit of the modern bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the gospel of this moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion, and if in some noble natures it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of hypocrisy. His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity, and procrastination, and these usually go hand in hand with generosity, love, and charity. For it is not enough to be oneself in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves as well. What then is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique? And what is the charm in its mental fairyland? It is this. One must choose and find one's own path and be one's own self and live one's own life. That was written in 1902, but when I read that yesterday, it was like light bulbs, rockets, dynamite went off inside of me because there were finally words to explain these stirrings that I have felt within myself. When I've joked about Boho and Hippie, I guess I kind of still had the stereotypical images of unwashed, lawless, amoral people running around with not a care in the world, and it just things that didn't quite resonate with me. I'm kind of basically your typical soccer mom. I'm pretty ordinary in most respects, just going about my life. So I would joke about those things, but when I read that definition of bohemian, that really hit. That resonated deeply inside of me as who I am, who I really truly am. So I'm going to continue to explore those ideas. Bohemian has to do with there's travel, there's there's nature, there's all kinds of wonderful things that have always been a part of my life and the things that I love. And now it's almost like I have found a movement that describes me, and I feel like I have discovered my place in this world. I'm not going to become lawless. I'm not going to become, you know, crazy or any of those things. But here's the deal: I don't think that those things ever were those things. I think that was societal convention that told me that, that taught me to look at those movements that way. And now I'm looking at them with different eyes and realizing that a 55-year-old mother of nine can embrace bohemian principles as well: freedom, love, creativity, all of those parts of me that have been longing to come out more fully in my life. So I'm going to be talking a lot more about this. I just mostly wanted to share that passage with you, written by somebody else, because it's had such an impact on me at such an important crossroads time in my life that I thought it might resonate with some of you as well. My goal is to become a little bit more joyfully bohemian in my own unique way. I don't have to conform in Bohemian principles to any particular way of being Bohemian. That would kind of defeat the basic premise, wouldn't it? At any rate, I would encourage you as 2024 is beginning to try to find your own motto or mantra or call to be and begin to walk forward toward it, even in small little baby steps, and see where that leads you in your life. Questioning a lot of what you've thought before and allowing your deep soul stirrings to start to be your guide. We'll see what 2024 brings from that place. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you for joining me today on the Joy Felicity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share, and come follow me on all major social media sites at JoyFelicity or on my website, joyfelicity.com. You can follow the link in the description for this episode to all of the places that we can connect. Have a great day, everybody. And remember, dare to dream, plan to play, live to learn.